Back from Las Vegas.  The conference was really enjoyable - intellectually stimulating and intimidating at the same time.  My presentation went well, even though no one really attended.  So I pretty much gave the presentation to the other 4 presenters .  Mine was on the first day in the first session block, so unfortunately I missed out on those sessions.  Some of the sessions I went to were really interesting, and some were not so, and I wish I had attended some others, but overall it was good.

The last session I attended was "Is Google Good For Geography?"  This was on the last day on the last session block, and I think this was missed placed.  It would have generated more of a discussion afterwards had it been placed on Monday or Tuesday.  There were some heavy hitters there including Michael Goodchild, of which I'm sure whomever reads this blog has read one of his books.  I liked that they included a voice from the industry as well - Sean Gorman. Overall I agree with most of his presentation and particularly liked his challenging the session title questioning if there had ever been a session called "Is ESRI Good for Geography?"  Also, I liked that he said "Google does not equal the Geoweb."  I think there are a couple of things I'd like to point out - Geography does not equal GIS (and I wish I had attended this session); this seems to be overlooked by the Geoweb community.  I didn't like Gorman's twitter comments about some of the other presenters - "Ahh yes the critical theory conspiracy theorists have arrived - the tyranical [sic] majority in a dystopian algorithmic space" and "Wondering if he has ever written an algorithm guessing if he did it did not go well."  Same question could be asked of Gorman - has he ever read any Derrida, Foucault, or other critical theorists (at least beyond their Wikipedia page).  This is a weird backlash against academics...perhaps some sort of criticism of intellectual elitism (which I do share at times) ironically coming from the technorati elite?  On the other hand, academics have been critical of the GeoWeb community, so defensiveness would seem natural.  I am also a bit wary how loosely the term democratization was thrown around in his presentation (amongst others - including Dr. Goodchild's plenary).  The Internet is not a democratic space.  I live in Australia, a western country with the infrastructure for Internet usage.  Yet marginalized groups in this country don't even have access to electricity let alone the capability of mapping their spaces through the so-called egalitarian Open-Street Map.  Isn't this just a form of colonial place naming by rich (white?) westerners?  Ok, I'll get off my soap-box.  In his blog post Gorman quotes Michael Goodchild's closing discussions about next year having a "Is Microsoft Better for Geography?" session.  I think he takes this out of context, having attended the session I thought Dr. Goodchild's statement was toungue and cheek and was actually supporting Gorman's comments about singling out a particular organisation.  Overall I agree with what Brian Timmoney commented on Gorman's blog entry - that academic Geography is out of touch and too slow to adapting to the changes in the Geoweb.  More Geographers need to start blogs, and open source academic journals to adapt to these changes.  This disconnect is evident when searching for Neogeography and Geoweb in top tier journals like Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and Progress in Human Geography.  The excruciatingly slow review process is partly to blame.  I question the AAG as well - Why are these sessions not recorded and videos available through their website?  I also agree with Timmoney's comments about GIS education at Universities, in particular spatial databases.  I would add to the list a lack of fundamental programming/scripting skills.  I've said this to my former GIS professor.  When you look through GIS textbooks (even those from ESRI) rarely do any of them discuss or show any practical examples on how to run a spatial query in a spatial database, or create a simple Python script.

 I think my favorite session that I attended was entitled:  Virtual Learning Environments and Geographic Education.  Dr. Michael N. DeMers gave a presentation on how he is using Second Life to instruct GIS students in theoretical topics such as map projections and topology.  He said that the students perform better on the tests.  L Jesse Rouse of http://veryspatial.com/ fame, gave a presentation on constructing virtual worlds using Microsoft's XNA framework.  This is the type of stuff I remember hearing about in Junior high school when they talked about virtual reality in the classrooms taking students into history.  The session concluded with Dr. Nicholas Hedley on Mixed Realites.  I have to say I really really prefer the term Mixed Realities to Augmented Reality.  Dr. Hedley was an excellent presenter and demonstrated some use of Mixed Realities using a TIN overlaid on the "real" landscape while out on the field.  Pretty cool.  This lead me to find a few tools to create mixed reality applications - FLARToolkit (ActionScript) and ARToolkit (C++).  Haven't tried them out yet, but if you do a search you'll find them. 

 I might post more about the conference as I gather my thoughts.